Chandra Unplugged - No nonsense, Straight-up blogging from a Life Coach

How to Meditate

There are many methods for meditation, but only one way to meditate.  If you do not understand how the mind works, you will never be able to truly meditate. 

Everything has a nature and the nature of the mind is to have thoughts.  (The mind is doing what it is supposed to do.) This is important to understand before we begin meditation so we can approach our mind as a friend, and not an enemy.

The mind is like a top.  It is spinning so fast, we think it is standing still.  It is only when the mind begins to slow down, (through meditation) that we are able to “watch” the thoughts.

Meditation is not about “trying” to rid the mind of thoughts.  When we say, “Do not think of a monkey", what is the first thing we think of?  The problem is not the thoughts, but us.  We think we are our thoughts and feel compelled to chase after them.  This sets up a never-ending cycle of a mind that never stops.  In other words, the tail is wagging the dog, rather than the dog wagging the tail. (to be continued)

Chogyam Trungpa

Chogyam Trungpa was a meditation master, scholar, poet, and artist.  He was one of the most influential figures in the development of Buddhism in America.  He coined the terms "spiritual materialism" and "crazy wisdom" and defined the term "warrior" to mean one who is brave enough to face his demons, a true warrior.  Read his books, any of them, and gain insight, compassion, joy and surrender. (Click Here)

From The Essential Chogyam Trumgpa: In "Cosmic Joke" he says, " In order to create through the ambition of ego, we must understand how we set up me and my territory, how we use our projections as credentials to prove our existence.  The source of the effort to confirm our solidity is an uncertainty as to whether ot not we exist.  Driven by tis uncertainty, we seek to prove our existence by finding a reference point outside ourselves, something with which tohave a relationship, something solid to feel separate from.  But the whole enterprise is questionable if we really look back and back and back.  Perhaps we have perpetrated a giantic hoax?

The hoax is the solidarity of I and other.  This dualistic fixation comes from nothingness.  In the beginning there is open space, zero, self-contained, without relationship.  But in order to confirm zeroness, we must create one to prove that zero exists.  But even that is not enough; we might get stuck with just one and zero.  So we begin to advance, venture out and out.  We creat two to confirm one's existence, and then we go out again and confirm two by three, three by four, and so on.  We set up a background, a foundation from which we can go on and on to innfiniity.  This is what is called samsara, the continuous vicious cycle of confirmation of existence.